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The
development of the pianoforte during the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth
century brought the instrument enormous popularity, as it replaced the more
fragile harpsichord as the means, above all, of domestic entertainment. Much of
the popular music included here was written with this lucrative market in mind.

Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, the earliest of the composers represented here, unless we are
to include the traditional English song Greensleeves, attributed erroneously by
some to King Henry VIII, earned a living for himself, in the last ten years of
his life, by teaching, performing and writing music principally for his own
use. In letters home to Salzburg from Vienna, where he had settled in 1781 in independence both of
a patron and of his anxious father, he mentions three piano sonatas, which he
is sending to his sister Anna-Maria. These sonatas, of which the F Major
Sonata, K. 332, is the third, seem to have been written in Vienna in
1783. The slow movement of the sonata is a fine example of Mozart at his most
moving.

The
Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin belongs to the earlier half of the nineteenth
century. Born in Warsaw in 1810, he moved to Paris, where he established
himself as a teacher and as ~ pianist of poetic delicacy, while writing music
for the instrument that coupled an operatic melodic invention with an
imaginative and adventurous use of harmony and an expansion of existing forms.
The Waltz in C Sharp Minor is a good example of the magic he could impart to a
dance that had taken the ballrooms of Europe by storm.

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
the second half of his surname assumed in honour of a relative who, like his
own branch of the family, had turned to Christianity, provided his contemporaries
with a number of albums of short piano pieces of great charm. On Wings of Song,
however, was originally a setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine, written in 1840,
and was to prove enormously popular.

Goethe,
the great German writer and polymath, had been visited by the boy Mendelssohn
at Weimar, and predicted for him a great future, provided he was not spoiled by
the women, who seemed likely to make much of him. The novel Wilhelm Meister had
long proved a happy source for composers in search of texts. The book, a Bildungsroman,
introduces the mysterious gypsy girl Mignon, and her songs were to be set to
music by many composers, from Schubert onwards. Tchaikovsky was to set three of
the songs, to Russian adaptations, and of these the song known in English as
None but the lonely heart, aversion of Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, has won an
enduring position.

The
Bohernian composer Antonin Dvorak was a near contemporary of Tchaikovsky, a man
of peasant origin and of a much simpler cast of mind than the neurotic and
diffident Russian. Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, originally written in the form
used here, for piano duet, were a popular sequel to his earlier Moravian
Dances, providing domestic duettists with a particularly lively addition to
their repertoire.

The
innovative poetic use of the piano initiated by Chopin was to lead, towards the
end of the nineteenth century, to the piano pieces of the French composer
Claude Debussy, who was to take still further the possibilities suggested by
his predecessor. Clair de lune, the third piece in the Suite bergamasque,
enjoyed a popularity that the composer found irritating, since audiences would
demand the piece, preferring it unjustifiably, it seemed, to music of greater
weight.

The
Russian pianist and composer Sergey Rakhmaninov suffered similar discomfort from
the excessive popularity of one of his Preludes. He never seems to have
objected, however, to the ubiquity of his Vocalise, written, as the title
suggests, for voice without words, but widely known in a multitude of
transcriptions which do nothing to diminish the beauty of the melody.

The
Polish pianist and patriot Ignacy Jan Paderewski, briefly Prime Minister and
Minister of Foreign Affairs in his newly independent country in 1919, might
have been similarly haunted by his Minuet in G, to which the Melodie in G Flat
is a close rival.

Moritz
Moszkowski, born in Breslau in 1854, was also of Polish descent and was to
provide music that proved immediately attractive, whether as part of his own
stock-in-trade as a pianist, or for the piano-playing public. His lighter
music, markedly more successful than his more ambitiously conceived works,
includes the orchestral Serenata, Opus 15, which he arranged himself for piano.

The
Rustle of Spring, a piece that sounds rather more difficult than it is, has
delighted amateur pianists anxious to impress. The Norwegian composer Christian
Sinding was in fact a more substantial figure than this might suggest, with
Wagnerian operas and symphonies to his credit, and a formidable number of
songs, some 250 in all, ensuring him a place as the successor of Grieg in the
musical history of his country.

Gustav
Lange's popular Edelweiss is a slighter work, while the Polish amateur Tekla Badarzewska-Baranowska
might well have been forgotten entirely, had it not been for the phenomenal
international success of The Maiden's Prayer, which no ambitious sequels could
equal. Cecile Chaminade, whose languorous portrait used to adorn the covers of
her many piano compositions, was a French pianist of considerable ability, her
music offering something well suited to audiences in the 1890s, when she made a
considerable name for herself also in England. La Lisonjera, The Flatterer, is a rival in
popularity to her wistful Automne.

Peter Nagy

Peter Nagy was born in Eastern Hungary
in 1960 and is among the leading pianists of the younger generation in his
native country. He entered the FerencLisztAcademy in Budapest at the age of 15, after winning various prizes at home
and abroad, making his first professional international appearances in Finland and in Yugoslavia in
1977, followed by concerts at the Salzburg Interforum in 1978 in a duo with his
compatriot Balazs Szokolay. In the same year he toured the German Democratic
Republic and the Soviet Union and in 1979 made his debut in France at the Menton
Festival. There followed concerts is West Germany, Switzerland, and the United
States of America, where he took further lessons from Gyorgy Seb6k at Indiana
University. Nagy has played in Japan with various orchestras, was in 1987
Artist-in-Residence at the Camberra School of Music in Australia, and
has taken part in the festivals of Aix-en-Provence, Athens, Llandaff, Cardiff, Paris, Bonn, Cologne, Geneva, Moscow and Leningrad. He is at present soloist with the Hungarian National
Philharmonic Orchestra and a member of the teaching staff of the LisztAcademy in Budapest.

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